A Phase 1b Study of Humanized Ks-Interleukin-2 (Huks-Il2) Immunocytokine with Cyclophosphamide in Patients with Epcam-Positive Advanced Solid Tumors

BackgroundHumanized KS-interleukin-2 (huKS-IL2), an immunocytokine with specificity for epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM), has demonstrated favorable tolerability and immunologic activity as a single agent.MethodsPhase 1b study in patients with EpCAM-positive advanced solid tumors to determine the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) and safety profile of huKS-IL2 in combination with low-dose cyclophosphamide. Treatment consisted of cyclophosphamide (300mg/m2 on day 1), and escalating doses of

Comparison of J-r test techniques under gaseous hydrogen environment

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Author Correction: Long-term field comparison of multiple low-cost particulate matter sensors in an outdoor urban environment

Correction to: Scientific Reports https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43716-3, published online 16 May 2019. This Article contains a typographical error in the Acknowledgements section. “Natural Environmental Research Council grant number [NE/L002531/1]” should read: “Natural Environment Research Council: NE/N012070/1”

Testing Smart City environmental monitoring technology using small scale temporary cities

Exposure to Particulate Matter (PM) has been identified as a major health problem worldwide. Established measurement techniques require equipment costing many thousands of dollars and specialist expertise to maintain. Ongoing research is investigating the use of low cost <;$300 sensors to enable greater temporal-spatial density of readings to be taken. There are questions about the suitability and reliability of these low-cost sensors, which can be addressed by deploying and evaluating the sensors in real world applications. Rather than deploying standalone data loggers for each sensor, each air quality monitor is connected to an IoT device to enable real time transmission of data. We propose festival sites as small scale cities to enable a short term deployments and evaluation of sensors. This work illustrates that, if coupled with higher resolution of wind data, low-cost sensors may enable to follow the evolution of pollution hotspots and help the identification of pollution sources. This study, building upon the body of work focused on the evaluation and best practice of using low-cost sensors for PM monitoring. We present data from these IoT devices and experiences gained from using a festival site as a substitute for a city

Education and post-communist transitional justice: negotiating the communist past in a memorial museum

This paper examines the role of education within post-communist transitional justice. It focuses on the ways in which young Romanians negotiate the communist past during an educational visit to a memorial museum. The museum enabled these visitors to better understand the repression of the communist era, had limited impact in changing their attitudes towards communism, but it did provoke reflection upon and comparison between the present and the communist past. Visitors recognized the role of the museum as a site of memory within post-communist transitional justice, but were also critically aware of the limitations to what the museum could achieve. The implications of these findings for postcommunist transitional justice are examined

Encountering the Victims of Romanian Communism: Young People and Empathy in a Memorial Museum

Many states in post-communist East-Central Europe have established memorial museums which aim to tell the story of suffering under the communist regime. They also seek to encourage visitors to develop empathy for the victims of communist repression.This paper explores the responses of a group of young people to a memorial museum in Romania (Sighet Memorial Museum), focusing on how these visitors experienced empathy for the victims of communist-era violence. Data were collected using focus groups. Most participants showed a degree of empa- thy for the victims of suffering but this was usually shallow in nature. However some visitors displayed more“active” empathy (characterized by deeper imaginative and cogni- tive engagement). The paper explores how both the design and environment of the museum and the back- ground experiences of visitors influenced the develop- ment of empathy. It argues that empathy is not an automatic response to suffering and instead can be con- sidered as an interaction between the design of the museum and the background knowledge of visitors. The paper argues that empathy is an important means for young people to participate in remembering the commu- nist period, and is a means to make“prosthetic”memories of an authoritarian past which they have not experienced first-hand

Nonlinear predictive control of processes with variable time delay: a temperature control case study

Material or fluid transportation is a commonly encountered phenomenon in industrial applications, generating variable time delay that makes the design of feedback control loops more difficult. This paper investigates the applicability of MPC (Model Predictive Control) strategies to this type of processes. The experimental setup consists of a heated tank, of which the outlet temperature (measured at a certain distance from the tank) is controlled by manipulating the outlet flow. The nonlinear EPSAC (Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Control) approach is used, which reduces the complexity of nonlinear optimization to iterative quadratic programming. It is shown that developing a process model in which dynamics are decoupled from the variable time delay leads to a Smith predictor-like control structure, that allows the proper operation of the control loop with fixed control parameters. The performance of the predictive controller is compared on the pilot plant to the performance of classic control approaches for systems with time delay

Optical Properties of Composites Based on Graphene Oxide and Polystyrene

In this work, new optical properties of composites based on polystyrene (PS) microspheres and graphene oxide (GO) are reported. The radical polymerization of styrene in the presence of benzoyl peroxide, pentane and GO induces the appearance of new ester groups in the PS macromolecular chains remarked through an increase in the absorbance of the infrared (IR) band at 1743 cm&minus;1. The decrease in the GO concentration in the PS/GO composites mass from 5 wt.% to 0.5 wt.% induces a diminution in the intensities of the D and G Raman bands of GO simultaneous with a down-shift of the D band from 1351 to 1322 cm&minus;1. These variations correlated with the covalent functionalization of the GO layers with PS. For the first time, the photoluminescent (PL) properties of PS/GO composites are reported. The PS microspheres are characterized by a PL band at 397 nm. Through increasing the GO sheets&rsquo; concentration in the PS/GO composite mass from 0.5 wt.% to 5 wt.%, a PS PL quenching process is reported. In addition, in the presence of ultraviolet A (UVA) light, a photo-degradation process of the PS/GO composite having the GO concentration equal to 5 wt.% is demonstrated by the PL studies